75 Hives Of Dead Bees
In this week’s segment of The Neonicotinoid View, host June Stoyer and Tom Theobald talk to commercial migratory beekeeper, James Cook about the Keep The Hives Alive Tour. The tour is an effort to educate the public about the true impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on honeybees. Also joining the discussion is bee health advocate and environmental author, Graham White who will share his views about why mainstream media paved the way for industry to exploit this effort to mislead the public.
“The Neonicotinoid View”, which is produced by The Organic View Radio Show is unique, weekly program that explores the impact of neonicotinoids on the environment. Tune in each week as June and Tom explore the latest research and news from the beekeeping community.
Listen To The Interview:
Click the play button on the video
Keep The Hives Alive Tour
Beekeepers, consumers, environmentalists, food advocates, and everyone who enjoys fruits, nuts, vegetables, and seeds are organizing a tour across the country to raise awareness about the plight of pollinators, and how pesticides contribute to the death of honey bees, monarch butterflies, native bees, and reduced crop yields. The tour will occur right before and during National Pollinator Week. We aim to give pesticide companies, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the general public an accurate portrayal of the impact bee-toxic chemicals have had on the livelihoods of American beekeepers. We will travel across the United States, holding rallies and events to raise awareness about pollinator decline, and end up at the EPA to rally our supporters, and urge action on bee-toxic pesticides to safe guard our food supply.
Be a champion for bees and beekeepers! Donate to the tour to help beekeepers take on take on the pesticide manufacturers, and urge the government to protect beekeepers, honey bees, butterflies, birds, and native pollinators.
Link to Indigogo Page:
https://www.indiegogo.com/
Donate, take action and learn more at pollinatorstewardship.com/
Bump, Set and Spike
Although the uninformed public and numerous non-profits continue to believe that main stream media does not censor and reports the genuine facts, here is a prime example of how important advertising dollars are in comparison to the truth. The fact that numerous comments were submitted in regards to this article and none were approved speaks volumes. Bee health advocate, Graham White shared his response with us in regards to an article posted in the Star Tribune titled, “Why are 2.5M dead bees touring the country?”
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What a superb educational initiative from James Cook and his fellow beekeepers; truly creative, truly innovative – they deserve our gratitude.
However I was very surprised by the rather complacent analysis offered by State Entomologist, Amanda Bachman. She delivers the standard “Multiple Causes Theory’ on the loss of 40% plus of bee colonies in South Dakota. She even implied that this was somehow ‘a good thing’ – because things were far, far worse in Minnesota. The loss of 40 – 60% of America’s bee colonies annually, is utterly catastrophic and points to something terribly, terribly wrong with the state of the environment. Bees are the ‘canary in the coal mine’ and when 40 – 60% of your bees perish each year, they are sending you a klaxon warning that the whole ecology is in deepest peril.
She may be entirely unaware of it, but when she gives out the ‘Multi-factorial Theory’ of mass bee deaths, she is almost reading from the Pesticide Industry Public Relations handbook – prepared by Bayer, and Croplife over the last 15 years.
Is she really unaware of the 1100 peer reviewed, independent Science studies, which all confirm that Neonicotinoid pesticides are the NUMBER ONE factor in global bee deaths . Or does she perhaps simply believe what she has been told by Bayer and Croplife.
Neonicotinoids were first introduced in France in 1994, when Bayer unleashed Imidacoprid on French Sunflowers. ONE MILLION bee colonies died that year and hundreds of French commercial beekeepers lost their bees, their businesses, their homes in some cases. Bayer denied all responsibility and produced fake science studies which said it was ‘biologically impossible for imidacloprid to appear in the flowers, nectar and pollen of the sunflowers.” Bees continued to die in their billions in France in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998. Finally the French beekeepers commissioned independent scientists, who immediately found the poison in the flowers. As a result, the French Government BANNED the neonicotinoids from use on sunflowers, corn, canola, peas, beans and other crops in 2000 AD.
That ban has NEVER been lifted.
Bayer denied everything and then sold its poisons in Germany, UK, Italy, Spain and the USA. In every country where neonics were introduced, mass bee deaths occurred. More than 20 million bee colonies have died in the USA since 2003.
In Europe, the scientific debate raged for a decade after the French ban, but in December 2013 the European Union BANNED neonicotinoids for all 27 countries of the Union. So the three main neonics: Imidacloprid, Clothianidin and Thiamethoxam are banned in: Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Holland, . .. etc. Guess where they are NOT banned? That’s right, the gold ol’ USA, where the EPA, the USDA and ms Bachman have chosen to ignore a mountain of peer-reviewed Scientific Studies – 1100 papers in fact – which have all demanded a complete ban on neonics.
Neonics are fantastically poisonous to bees. Most pesticide kill at doses of perhaps 100 parts per million, but neonics attack bees brains and cause severe behavioural abnormality at just 5 parts per BILLION. These are the most poisonous substances ever created by the perversion of chemistry. So why have 20 million American bee colonies died since 2003? Simple. Currently, over 200 million acres of American crops are treated with neonics – every single seed of corn, wheat, barley, canola, peas, beans, potatoes, apples, almonds, berry fruit . . .all of that vast acreage – every single seed is treated with the poison. This renders the flowers, nectar and pollen of the plants and trees poisonous to bees, at infinitesimal doses of 1 -5 ppb.
Moreoever, the poison does not STAY on the crops. Over 95% of the seed coating falls into the soil, or gets emitted in planting machine dust. If bees contact that they die instantly – by the thousands.
But the poison that remains in the soil dissolves in water, drains into ditches, ponds and rivers, and is re-absorbed by wild flowers, clover, echinacea, prairie flowers etc. These in turn become deadly to wild bees, butterflies – and the 4,000 species of native bees which feed on them in the USA.
Ms Bachman’s espousal of the “Varroa parasite” theory echoes the Bayer/ Croplife/ EPA playbook.
Of course, varroa is a nasty parasite of honeybees; but not ONE single scientific paper has ever demonstrated that varroa can kill a HEALTHY colony. France had varroa mites in every beehive in the country from 1960 until 1994, 34 years , without a single mention of any incidence of ‘Colony Collapse’ or mass bee deaths. But, when neonics came in 1994 – a million bee colonies died instantly.
Varroa is a ‘symptom’ of colonies already poisoned by neonics – and varroa will kill a poisoned colony by infecting it with viruses and fungal diseases; but varroa does not kill healthy colonies.
Ms Bachman appears to know little about the global impact of neonicotinoids on bee populations world wide, since 1994. The issue has in fact been exhaustively covered in the Science Literature in thousands of articles and papers – especially in the specialist Entomology Journals and Beekeeping Journals.
She points out with some enthusiasm: “there are great opportunities for bee researchers just now – Bayer, Syngenta and other corporations are pouring large funds into bee research”. That is of course quite true – but the funds would only be given to any researcher if they restricted their interest to looking at purely tangential matters like wildflowers and climate change. Any researcher to wanted to study neonicotinoids, would be shown the door by the EPA and Bayer and anyone who even suggested that neonicotinoids might be the primary cause of American bee deaths would be committing career suicide.
I would be very happy to put Ms Bachman with a number of truly distinguished bee experts in America who would be happy to brief her on the true extent to which neonicotinoids now pervade every environment, every habitat, every landscape – both urban and rural across the American continent.
Sincerely,
Graham White
Beekeeper and environmental author
Edinburgh, Scotland